April 12, 2015

The Dying Art of the Visa: A Personal History

The following article was originally published by the Huffington Post (India) on April 12, 2015. An excerpt is included below, and the full text can be accessed here.

Poor Phileas Fogg. In his fictitious journey around the
world in eighty days, Jules Verne's globetrotting hero may have saved a woman
from ritual immolation, been mistaken for an arch-criminal and survived an attack
by Sioux warriors. But he also had to undergo the bothersome, mundane exercise
of attaining a visa, whether upon arrival in Suez or in San Francisco.

It's an experience seasoned international travellers know
all too well. Our wanderlust compels us to spend many wasteful hours at
embassies and consulates, filling out mind-numbingly bureaucratic forms
(sometimes in triplicate) and shelling out hundreds of dollars on visa
applications.

But all that is fast changing. More countries are
beginning to issue visas electronically or upon arrival, while others are doing
away with short-term visas completely in order to encourage tourism and
business travel.

Today, anyone lucky enough to be in possession of a valid
American passport can take a holiday or business trip to Peru or Poland, Malawi
or Mongolia at a moment's notice. The same holds true for travel to some 156
other countries. Many citizens of Europe are even better off. Finns, Swedes and
Brits are able to travel on a whim to 173 countries and territories. Even some
of us less fortunate have it easier than ever. As an Indian passport holder, I
can now visit about 45 countries without a prior visa, and in some other cases
can have visas issued electronically.

The slow death of the visa is naturally for the best in
our ever globalising world. But one minor casualty is that the visa -- as a
physical object -- has become something of a dying art. Visas were
traditionally meant to serve several purposes. They had to easily communicate
necessary information to authorities, such as validity and the terms of stay.
They were often designed to prevent easy forgery. And they were occasionally
used to convey aspects of a country's national character through visual
symbolism and imagery. For all these reasons, the visa, in its brief heyday,
was (like the modern airline baggage tag) a little-appreciated masterpiece of
modern design.

Over the past 25 years, the visa's form and function has
evolved, along with technological advances. Security holograms, watermarks and
other such breakthroughs made visas -- like banknotes -- less susceptible to
forgery. Bleeding ink, security fibres and raised printing were often added,
serving both security and design functions. And various digital technologies,
from machine-readable text to digital photography allowed for easier data
access and identification by airline and immigration officials. A glance
through visas in my old passports -- I found six going back to 1988 -- revealed
some fascinating technological, political and artistic trends from the past
quarter century. [Read more]